Chinese Insurance Giant Is Threatening To Sue The New York Times

China's second-biggest insurance company has threatened to take
legal action against the New
York Times for reports that Premier Wen Jiabao's relatives
had accumulated massive wealth, largely through holdings in the
firm.

In a written statement on Monday, Ping An
Insurance (Group) Co of China Ltd said it had "noted recent media
coverage related to the company, which contains serious
inaccuracies, facts being distorted and taken out of context, as
well as flawed logic".

It added that it "will take appropriate legal action commensurate
with the damage and adverse impact the media reports have caused
to the company".

Ping An did not name the New York Times Co in the statement, but
a Ping An spokesman told Reuters
that it referred to a New York Times article published over the
weekend.

The
New York Times issued a report in October, citing corporate
and regulatory records that it said showed Wen's family had
amassed massive wealth during his time in power, the biggest
source of which it said was large stakes in Ping An.

On Saturday, it issued a follow-up report, saying that in 1999,
Ping An Chairman Ma Mingzhe wrote to Wen - who was vice premier
at the time - and another official, imploring them to relax rules
aimed at containing risk in the financial sector that would have
required a breakup of the company.

Ping An remained intact, and relatives of Wen eventually came to
control Taihong, a company that acquired a large stake in Ping An
in December 2002, eight months after the waiver on breaking up
the company was granted, the Times said.

The price paid by Taihong was one-fourth that paid by HSBC
Holdings PLC for a stake it bought two months earlier, the Times
added.

The Times said it was not clear whether Wen had personally
intervened on behalf of Ping An's request for a waiver, or if Wen
was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.

"We stand by our story," New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy
said in an email to Reuters, adding that the company did not plan
to comment further at this time.

Lawyers representing the family of Premier Wen have rejected
claims by the Times that relatives had accumulated at least $2.7
billion. A Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to comment
directly on Monday, but previously the ministry had criticized
the paper's investigation, saying it "smears China and has
ulterior motives".

Since its initial report on the wealth of Wen's family in late
October - including documents that showed the premier's mother
had holdings of $120 million worth of Ping An stock in 2007 - the
newspaper's English and Chinese language websites have been
blocked in China.

The website of Bloomberg
news has also been blocked in China since it reported in June
that the extended family of president-designate Xi Jinping had
investments in companies with assets of $375 million, and an 18
percent indirect stake in a company with $1.7 billion in assets.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones and Sui-Lee Wee in BEIJING and
Jason Subler in SHANGHAI; Editing by Ken Wills and Robert Birsel)